Something’s brewing. The Leipzig-based post-rock band Fargo presents a new album comprising four instrumental songs, each named after German cities, that have the sky shaking, crumbling, dreaming and resurrecting. They wander empty streets and dark houses. Founded in 2012 (and featuring a new guitarist and bassist since 2017), the four-piece uses songs both rousing and somber, intricately and cleverly arranged, to deconstruct a postmodern world that operates through seemingly anonymous power structures. Within Fargo’s convincing dramaturgies, the guitars can sound like pianos, strings or synthesizers, communicating with each other, interrupting each other, and driving each other forward, while bass and drums stoically set the tempo and rhythm. The resulting pieces have a dense clarity and inner drama, clearly harder than the band’s earlier works, and sometimes suggest a secret army marching to defend diversity against simplicity. The complex, far-reaching pieces unfold musical textures which are suspensefully interwoven, distorted and deconstructed in order to let them radiate in a furious finale. Distant relatives include the sound explosions of Russian Circles and the spheric landscapes of Sigur Rós.

The album is dedicated to “Geli.” This was the nickname given to Angelika Zwarg, mother of two close friends of the band and an art teacher and painter who died in 2018 after a long illness. Angelika Zwarg was born in 1959 in Zschopau (a small East German city near Chemnitz at the foot of the Ore Mountains), where she lived for nearly her entire life. This is a place and a landscape that she both loved and hated, appreciated and despaired of—and you only despair of something that you honor immensely and that you call “home.” From these roots she used her art to drive delicately ramified branches into the clouds and into the night sky, where the very same moon shines and illuminates the “Dark Houses” (the title of the 2013 painting adorning the cover).

Like Angelika Zwarg’s intricately varnished paintings, Fargo interweaves musical patterns until a new whole is created. This is something to be appreciated and defended—which is what the samples of Winston Churchill’s famous 1940 speech hint at. Back then, the conservative British prime minister dedicated his country to the fight against Hitler: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” Or in Fargo’s own words: “The sample in ‘Pforzheim’ reminds us that murderous ideologies like Fascism, National Socialism as well as their contemporary specters are not defeated by pious hopes but instead demand practical resistance. In that sense, we understand the speech as a plea to act and to resist Fascism, National Socialism and their contemporary manifestations.”